LSU isn't lowering standards, it's raising hopes

Posted Sep 16, 2018

LSU President F. King Alexander says a "holistic review" of student applications is meant to give more thought to some who just miss the cut but would be a good fit for the school. (Photo by Brianna Paciorka, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

President Bill Clinton was fond of describing the American Dream as the idea that, "If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you."

The catch, of course, is knowing what standards will be used to evaluate the fruits of that labor, who makes the rules and whether someone is putting a thumb on the scales in favor of some and to the detriment of others.

That's essentially the calculation that sparked a small dust-up this month over Louisiana State University's decision to modify its method for admitting students to the Baton Rouge campus.

Like most universities across the nation, LSU has for years used a student's high school grade-point average and a benchmark on the ACT or SAT tests almost exclusively to decide who gets to cross the school's threshold and who is left standing outside the door. The system was simple and seemed imminently fair to those students who were reasonably diligent in attending class and adept at filling in the bubbles on a standardized test.

LSU currently requires a 3.0 GPA in certain core classes and a 22 on the ACT with an 18 in English and a minimum math subscore of 19 (or the equivalent on the SAT). Anyone failing to clear the ACT and GPA bars was rejected out of hand.

Except that this year, LSU officials decided to add some flexibility to what had been an essential TRUE or FALSE equation and add some metaphorical as well as literal essay questions to the process. The GPA and ACT standards remain in place, but admissions officers are able to take a closer look at applications that just missed the cut.

The term of art is "holistic review," which sounded just squishy enough to raise a red flag for critics claiming that LSU President F. King Alexander was lowering the school's standards after years of progress in building the university's academic and research bona fides.

A social media blast on a Facebook page called Put Louisiana First and written by Board of Regents member Richard Lipsey suggests that the tweaks to LSU's admissions policy "may be very good for Alexander and certain bureaucrats, as it will allow them more personal power" to favor "the child of a wealthy donor or influential politician" over the "hardworking students and parents who have been competing and succeeding on a fair playing field with defined rules of the game."

Lipsey lauds the quality of LSU's incoming freshman class apparently without realizing that it is the first product of the new holistic review policy.

But far from Lipsey's claims of class warfare and rising oligarchy, the new review order interjects common sense and common grace into what had been a purely bureaucratic exercise.

Kids whose GPA may have suffered because of a natural disaster or a personal loss get another look. A student who made good grades while working a job to support the family but didn't have a good day on that one shot she had to take the ACT also gets reviewed.

And then there was the very real high school valedictorian with a 22 composite on the ACT but a math score that fell just below the requirement.

"And we found out that other kids were going to get a rejection letter -- one had a 4.35 grade-point average, a 32 ACT -- and we're going to send them a rejection letter because the state of Washington's core curriculum doesn't match Louisiana's."

The valedictorian and the Washington applicant were both accepted into LSU's fall class.

Replacing the arbitrary rule of GPA and ACT with some human consideration and wisdom are absolutely the right thing to do, especially as LSU remains far from exclusive. The admission rates for the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Florida, for example, are about 40 percent, while Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and Yale are between 5 percent and 6 percent.

LSU, meanwhile, accepted 74 percent of those students applying for the 2018 class, eventually yielding 5,800 students on campus, the school's largest-ever freshman class. That includes a 22 percent increase in out-of-state students and a 14 percent jump for in-state applicants. Any Louisiana student that qualified for TOPS at LSU was admitted without additional review.

"The kids that are normally getting in are getting in," Alexander said. "It's just the kids on the edge and a little below that are getting ready to get a rejection letter. We're going to take a little closer look at that group that's almost there."

Working hard and following the rules doesn't always show up in the first look at the numbers. LSU is right to dig deeper.

Tim Morris is a columnist on the Latitude team at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Latitude is a place to share opinions about the challenges facing Louisiana. Follow @LatitudeNOLA on Facebook and Twitter. Write to Tim at tmorris@nola.com.